December 2003 - cypherpunks-legacy

Soviet spies at NSA
by ichudov＠Algebra.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

http://customnews.cnn.com/cnews/pna.show_story?p_art_id=341606&p_section_na… [look at the last paragraph] Former Army Clerk Sentenced for Cold War Espionage AP 24-SEP-97 PHILADELPHIA (AP) A former Army clerk at the National Security Agency was sentenced to 18 years in prison Wednesday for selling secrets to the Soviet Union three decades ago. Robert S. Lipka, 51, pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit espionage. He was arrested last year after his ex-wife betrayed him. "I put this to rest many years ago, and I never dreamed it would come out like this," a tearful Lipka told U.S. District Judge Charles R. Weiner. "I owe an apology to a lot of people." Lipka was trained as an intelligence analyst and had top security clearance with the NSA at Fort Meade, Md., where he was responsible for distributing and destroying classified documents. Between 1965 and 1967, Lipka photographed documents with a camera provided by the Soviets and dropped the film off in a park for up to $1,000 a drop, prosecutors said. He allegedly got a total of $27,000 from the KGB. In the late 1960s, Lipka told his then-wife, Patricia, that he was selling NSA materials to the Soviets. The couple married in 1966 and divorced in 1974. In 1993, after Lipka's wife went to authorities, Lipka recounted the arrangement for an FBI agent posing as a Soviet spy. After his arrest, the coin collector and gambler from Millersville threatened to reveal government secrets on the Internet if his case were not dropped. The judge also fined Lipka $10,000.

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Remailer Attack
by nobody＠REPLAY.COM 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- According to Raph's remailer stats, the remailers have widely varying latencies. Given that only a few remailers have latencies which are acceptably low, the list of usable remailers is quite low. If the user of the remailer, Monty Cantsin for example, signs his messages, a fairly accurate measure of total transit time is obtained. The total transit time gives clues to the remailers which were actually used in the chain. In an of itself, this may not comprise the user, but combined with other weaknesses it will cause the attacker to be significantly more confident of identification hypotheses. The remailers should all have about the same latency. 0 seconds seems like a good Schelling point. What would it take to reduce remailer latency to under 60 seconds for most of the remailers? Do people need old 486s to dedicate to the task? Do they need money? Better software? If you operate a remailer, please tell us what you need to make it really work well. Perhaps the rest of us can help make it happen. Monty Cantsin Editor in Chief Smile Magazine http://www.neoism.org/squares/smile_index.html http://www.neoism.org/squares/cantsin_10.html -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQEVAwUBNCrG4paWtjSmRH/5AQFuAAf+ID6TSjoUV1sVehzW6DoqVXREyO/fR4Uw H+W6QCiTOQaRhTD1Z6WSaL9FOaBJ5aSHCdLzKy9eIvagXsYR+eqVBdO0oSuDaloc BYSN+QXSKvMEuEotkCF4RicRoENlTmD0Qcrz4KvvW+d+jRxyxejs9O0HqDeTq9y/ KpBtq8CytpEMmGc6VSHuAX90qwJTtHUk/k4ulXU7v4xMmBLu1HpS/9M5h7mooybC 8qwVJKswAMI4wTB5FlBj/+b8txkCzMdqJkFdLEYu+LAGZfkB96W9uRU+eGekCHY2 6iycxv+m4r7wXPbP9A83Y6UnP4nkZBW86y7Du8NjVWGpscCfNjFF3g== =QjE1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: Oxley Amendment
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Thanks to Ariel Glenn for pointing to CDT's for quick posting of the SAFE vote against Oxley-Manton, for Markey-White: http://www.cdt.org/crypto/legis_105/SAFE/

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Secrets: The CIA's War At Home
by John Young 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Angus Mackenzie recounts in his new book the US intelligence agencies' and supporters' gradual erosion of Firt Amendment rights since the passage of the National Security Act of 1947. Secrets: The CIA's War At Home Angus Mackenzie University of California Press Berkeley, 1997. 241 pp. $27.50 ISBN 0-520-20020-9 "Secrets" decribes the origination of the Freedom of Information Act and other legislation to make government secrets available, the battles to get the laws passed and to defend them against subsequent attacks by proponents of secrecy who invoke the National Security Act. Mackenzie sets out the ways the intelligence industry, helped by the Department of Justice and the courts, manipulates the media, other governmental agencies and the citizenry by force and by seduction, with special attention to how it coopts its ostensible opponents like the ACLU and investigative journalists. He documents the undisclosed arrangments between the CIA and the media to favor journalism at the public's expense in legislation and in working relations. He carefully traces the long-running campaign to limit governmental employees from revealing what they know through various non-disclosure and lifetime secrecy agreements, sometimes breached by ex-agency heads who reveal secrets to boost careers. The book amply documents the ongoing struggle, now 50 years underway, to open the archives of domestic spying, new attempts to limit public access to governmental information, and moves to invade privacy. Here are the book's closing paragraphs: By the 1990s, reflecting the general conservative shift in Congress, many House members were actively welcoming a secrecy oath. Consideration of the oath, less comprehensive than the standard contract, first came up in the House Select Committee on Intelligence during a discussion of the fiscal year (FY) 1992 Intelligence Authorization Act. That led to a House rule requiring the intelligence committee members and staff to sign the oath. Interest in broadening the use of the oath did not stop there, especially for committee member Porter J. Goss of Florida. Goss's ties to the CIA dated from 1962 and his ten year stint as a clandestine service officer at the Agency. He and his fellow enthusiast, Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, offered amendments to the FY 1993 and 1994 authorization acts that would require secrecy oaths from every member of the House. The amendments did not prosper, but when the 104th Congress convened on January 4, 1995, backers of the oath changed tactics. This time the oath requirement for every House member was included in the packet of rules from the House Conference of the Majority. It became a new rule without debate. In the mid-1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick sounded the alarm about government censorship. Although a member of the Reagan administration's inner foreign policy circle, Kirkpatrick had a personal encounter with government censors over her refusal to sign the lifetime secrecy contract. Upon returning to her political science chair at Georgetown University from her post as U.S. United Nations ambassador, Kirkpatrick reexamined John Stuart Mill's classic essay On Liberty and delivered a lecture on censorship. "Societies are not made stronger by the process of repression that accompanies censorship," she warned. "Censorship requires an assumption of infallibility, and that seems to Mill invariably negative. Repression of an opinion is thus bad for the censor, who inevitably acts from a conviction of his own infallibility," she told her students, "and bad for the opinion itself, which can neither be corrected nor held with conviction equal to the strength of an opinion submitted to challenge." As the twentieth century draws to a close, the 1947 National Security Act has become the Pandora's box that Ambassador Kirkpatrick and Congressman Hoffman had feared. Placing a legal barrier between foreign intelligence operations and domestic politics in the National Security Act has proved ineffectual. In the decades that followed 1947, the CIA not only became increasingly involved in domestic politics but abridged First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press in a conspiracy to keep this intrusion from the American people. The intelligence and military secrecy of the 1940s had broadened in the 1960s to covering up the suppression of domestic dissent. The 1980s registered a further, more fundamental change, as the suppression of unpopular opinions was supplemented by systematic and institutionalized peacetime censorship for the first time in U.S. history. The repressive machinery developed by the CIA has spread secrecy like oil on water. The U.S. government has always danced with the devil of secrecy during wartime. By attaching the word "war" to the economic and ideological race for world supremacy between the Soviet Union and the United States, a string of administrations continued this dance uninterrupted for fifty years. The cold war provided the foreign threat to justify the pervasive Washington belief that secrecy should have the greatest possible latitude and openness should be restricted as much as possible -- constitutional liberties be damned. With the collapse of the Soviet Union as a world power in 1990, even the pseudo-war rationale evaporated. But the partisans of secrecy have not been willing to accept the usual terms of peacetime. They have made clear their intentions to preserve and extend the wartime system. They will find a rationalization: if not the threat of the Soviet Union, then the goal of economic hegemony. Thus the U.S. government now needs to keep secrets to give an advantage to American corporate interests. Yet it is entrepreneurs who have been making the most use of FOIA -- not journalists, not lawyers. As of 1994, the great preponderance of all FOIA requests have been for business purposes. As the framers of the Constitution understood, the free exchange of ideas is good for commerce, but this idea has been widely forgotten in the years since the passage of the 1947 National Security Act. Only recently in the history of the world's oldest republic has secrecy functioned principally to keep the American people in the dark about the nefarious activities of their government. The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end of the cold war, espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom, as it was for the Minute Men at Compo Hill. The issue is principle, as it was for Ernest Fitzgerald, who never signed a secrecy contract but retained his Pentagon job because he made his stand for the First Amendment resonate in Congress. Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that the march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.

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Ethics in the Free Market
by Robert Hettinga 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Three laws of business: Reputation, Reputation, and Reputation... :-). Cheers, Bob Hettinga --- begin forwarded text Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 15:53:21 -0400 Subject: Ethics in the Free Market From: "CIPE-Announce" <cipe-announce(a)mail.cipe.org> To: CIPE-Announce(a)mail.cipe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Reply-To: CIPE-Announce(a)mail.cipe.org Precedence: Bulk =================================================================== Summary of Mr. Kanaga's Speech in Bucharest - May 1997 "Ethical Conduct is The Basic Need of a Free Market Economy" ------------------------------------------------------------------- For all of those countries emerging from a period of totalitarian control of business, a valuable part of the lesson on the move to free market economies is the discovery that "free markets" do not mean that "freedom for anything goes." Governments can promote market reform, privatize government-controlled business, and institute positive private investment regulations, but those steps alone are insufficient to achieve sustained growth and spur inflow of foreign private investment. The keys in my opinion are to establish high ethical standards of conduct for business and to create an atmosphere of trust and confidence among all members of the business community. Those two factors have been the foundation for success in those areas of the world that I have observed in over forty years of experience in the private sector of the business community. History proves this point. The countries with the highest ethical standards have attracted the most investment, while those with the lowest standards and with widespread corruption have received the least. In the latter environment, all members of society are losers. Business loses as the public perceives profits as ill-gotten gain, while lack of trust between business executives creates suspicion in the simplest transaction. Government and the democratic process also lose as the public's faith in institutions and the rule of law is further eroded every time the disclosure of bribe or other scandal erupts. Most importantly, ordinary people lose as the promise of democracy and the wealth that initiative could create fail to materialize. Strong ethics are essential to businesses. The entire free-market system is built on trust. Every time a contract is signed or a consumer purchases a product, an extension of good faith is made. If a businessman breaks his word or knowingly sells a faulty product or service, that extension of trust is broken. In looking back on my years in business, my days were filled with verbal assurances, rarely written contracts, that individuals would do what he and she they would do. And there was trust that it would be so. Human beings do fail in this process but the cost effectiveness of doing business this way is clear. The US stock market provides a good example of the critical role that trust plays. It is by far the largest stock market in the world. Why? It achieved this stature because investors put their money at the disposal of distant managers with the confidence that they can be trusted and that they will wisely invest the funds entrusted to them. To be sure, there have been situations where that confidence was misplace; such failures resulted in a strong push to develop corporate codes of conduct. But those failures have been minor blips in the total picture or people would not continue to invest in that stock market. Corporate codes of conduct, however, will only be worth the paper on which they are written if the leadership ignores them. If the leaders of the business community don't live up to the twin principles of honesty and integrity, those that work with those individuals will not. This is an essential ingredient within a single company. In order to make its code of conduct an effective tool, the company's leadership has to live up to it. If by his or her own demeanor the chief executive communicates that the code is unimportant, everyone in the organization will think the same. By contrast, the whole atmosphere in an organization changes overnight when management makes it clear that it expects strict adherence to its code of conduct. Another important point to keep in mind is that codes of conduct that work in one country will not necessarily work in another. Reforming governments must set their own standards in accordance with their country's business practices, rules and regulations. However, in my view, there is a golden opportunity in the countries of Eastern and Central Europe to achieve strong progress if they stand tall, and deal honorably with one another and trust one another. It is encouraging that reforming governments, such as we heard earlier in this meeting from Romania's leadership, are recognizing this critical factor. Earlier this year, its president and prime minister affirmed on the public record that eliminating government corruption and setting high standards of conduct are key priorities. If there isn't a fundamental trust between people, they will try to substitute excessive documentation for that lack of trust. It has been my experience here in Eastern Europe and in Russia and the Ukraine that in the 1980s and before people assembled massive files on the simplest matters to protect themselves. The result was not only a delay in execution of transactions but a terrible waste of time and money. The government cannot legislate integrity and honesty. The leadership in the business community, entrepreneurs and corporate managers alike, must demonstrate those qualities every day to make them the business norm. Each individual business executive-and the organization to which he or she belongs - must lead by example. And government must clearly indicate that it will not tolerate corruption within its own ranks or within the business community. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- William S. Kanaga is the Chairman of the Center for International Private Enterprise and former Chairman of Arthur Young. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- ABOUT THE CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL PRIVATE ENTERPRISE -------------------------------------------------------------------------- The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) was established in 1983 as an affiliate of the US Chamber of Commerce in Washington, DC. Its mission is to promote private enterprise and market-oriented economic reform around the globe by matching funds with a variety of local institutions in emerging democracies, including think tanks, business associations, educational institutions, and media training programs -- the building blocks of democratic society. Over 400 projects in more than 70 countries have been sponsored by CIPE since its inception. CIPE is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, the US Agency for International Development and private sources. --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert Hettinga (rah(a)shipwright.com) Philodox e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/

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Re: Oxley Amendment
by Brian B. Riley 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 9/24/97 11:40 PM, Michael Brock (hrast(a)flash.net) passed this wisdom: >I wonder if Mr. Solomon of NY will rethink his decision to not bring >up SAFE without Oxley to the entire House after the unprecedented >coaltion of companies and individual groups that came together to >make sure that mandatory key recovery stays a "1984" like dream. I >find it incomprehensible that one man, would block the introduction >of this bill, after it being proved that this is what his >constituents want.... ... since when did the will of the constituency ever have more than a minor influnce on a congress-critter??? ..... hmmmmm ... can you spell Jesse Helms ???? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBNCnof8dZgC62U/gIEQLTEgCeMK9gz7Xfhc8/DylY7dAh5SKQtvUAoJ0t yWg6yvYguskILFBPepNoTgWV =OXqF -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Brian B. Riley --> http://www.macconnect.com/~brianbr For PGP Keys <mailto:brianbr@together.net?subject=Get%20PGP%20Key> "Everyone who lives dies; but not everyone who dies has lived" -- back of a 'No Fear' t-shirt

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You Used MY Name?!?!?
by bureau42 Anonymous Remailer 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

To: senator(a)feinstein.senate.gov From: HugeCajones Remailer<hc(a)dev.null> X-Mailer: WinSock Remailer Version ALPHA1.3B X-Comments: - X-Comments: "He who shits on the road, will meet flies upon his return." X-Comments: - X-Comments: "GOMEZ IS COMING!" X-Comments: - X-Comments: This message is NOT from TruthMonster. X-Comments: It was sent by an automated anonymous asshole under the X-Comments: auspices of the Electronic Forgery Foundation. X-Comments: - X-Comments: Note: Send any complaints about abuse of this remailer X-Comments: to the person most concerned about your rights and X-Comments: freedoms. (Hint: It's a "mirror" site.) X-Comments: - X-Remailer-Setup: Maximum Message Size -- None X-Remailer-Setup: Reordering is OFF X-Remailer-Setup: News Posting DISABLED X-Remailer-Setup: Subject Header KEPT X-Remailer-Setup: Logging COMPLETE Messages X-Remailer-Setup: No PGP messages accepted Subject: !!! DEATH THREAT !!! You should be careful before you do foolish things like making a death threat because it can have really bad results. It can make people really nervous and think maybe they should get you first. Sometimes they hire other people to get you before you get themreally bad people sometimes. Sometimes even bad people who act like they are good people and fool everyone until they kill you. Which brings me to the point I am trying to make: You should not try to kill the Constitution any more because there is not enough left to make people safe and they might get really nervous and think maybe they should get you firstor even after. For revenge. People like the Constitution a lot and if you are making a death threat against it then it is like saying your going to kill someone elses friend or family and everyone knows that they will kill you because they are domestic and not a stranger. Or is it that they are stranger and not domesticated? Never mind. You know what I mean. Especially if you try to make it so that they cannot put aluminum foil hats on their thoughts and their words and their writing. Then they get really, really, nervous and maybe start thinking that they have to kill everybody because they are not safe from anybody. You should be careful if you find yourself walking next to someone whistling that Crosby Stills & Nash song "If you cant kill the one you lovethen kill the one youre with." (ç Thats a joke but it would be really funny if you took it serious and whacked someone out for whistling it anyway.) (Its not like they have a Constitutional right to whistle it or anything....hee, hee.) You should be careful before you vote to kill the Constitution and look under all your chairs and stuff, just in case. You should maybe look in your conscience too and see if you are not a bad person maybe. You should also maybe look in a mirror and make sure you are not cross eyed and that there is nobody beside you whistling that song "If looks could killthen you would only be hurting yourself."(<== that's a joke.) Even if you do think you can kill the Constitution and still have all of the people believe you are not a bad person then you should at least try not to let really stupid people who you work with say things like "I am too stupid to learn about this stuff so I am going to let the guys who want to make aluminum foil hats illegal and put everyone in jail decide how I vote to kill the Constitution." The one those guys who always say "Nuke DC" call Swinestein said that and it made everyone think you are all that stupid and going to let people with guns who kill women and children make your votes for you. Then even more of them say "Nuke DC" especially when they remember how bad the guys with the guns that you are letting vote for you fucked their friend (sorry but thats what they did) for making a stink with the IRS. That is really all I am trying to say. Is that you should be careful that you dont kill so much of the Constitution and let the guys with the guns screw so many people that nobody feels safe from them anymore because they wont just get nervous about them they will get nervous about you too because you promised to protect them and didnt. Just try to remember that it never ends. If you take away some of the guns from people then you have to take away all the guns or you are in big trouble. If you take away some of the Constitution from people then you have to take away all of the Constitution or you are in big trouble. Even if you think you took away all of the things that people can use to be safe and free then they will make morelike Doritos. If you try to kill them with bullshit then they will try to kill you with their own brand of fertilizer. If you take away their aluminum foil hats then they will make hats out of paper and call them Forever Young. Killing the Constitution is a lot like killing DCif your going to do it then you might as well do it right and do it all at once. Guys with guns who want to kill Freeh-dumb know that and so do guys with nukes who are Freeh-dumb fighters. (My uncle made up a new word about himhe said he "testiLies to Congress.") Dont be a stranger, APlayerToBeNamedLater p.s - If you see Declan McCullagh getting in his car and driving like hell away from the city then you should get in your car and do the same thing. You dont need to pack a suitcase because I think if he does that then there is already one packed. (Thats what the guys with guns told you in your secret meetings so you will kill the Constitution for them isnt it?) p.p.s.- If you hear someone say "President Freeh" then do not wait for Declan just get the hell out of there real fast anyway. You can come to my place if you want and help me send out secret aluminum foil hats. (Bring a whoopee cushion and we will make little funny booms instead of big scary ones. We are a little more laid back out here in the country than you guys in the big city.)

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Chutzpah! FBI Calls Privacy Extremists Elitist
by David HM Spector 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

FBI Calls Privacy Extremists Elitist (09/25/97; 4:30 p.m. EDT) By David Braun, TechWire MONTREAL -- Extremist positions on electronic encryption are not only threatening to normal law enforcement, but they are also elitist and nondemocratic, said Alan McDonald, a senior counsel member with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, at the International Conference on Privacy in Montreal on Thursday. Addressing a workshop on how far society should go in trading off privacy for effective law enforcement, McDonald said privacy activists had fought any balance in proposed encryption legislation. "Such absolute positions threaten not only electronic searches but also conventional searches for data that has been encrypted," McDonald said. Absolute positions on privacy were "pernicious on several levels," McDonald added. The absolute positions "handcuffed" law enforcement while also raising rights for citizens to levels that were unreasonable and that would have been foreign to the nation's founding fathers. Extreme privacy positions were ultimately elitist and nondemocratic in that they presumed the views of a knowing privacy cognoscenti should pre-empt the views of the nation's elected officials and the Supreme Court, McDonald said. McDonald's statements came a day after a key committee of the U.S. House of Representatives rejected an FBI-supported proposal that would have compelled the makers of encryption products to include features that would enable law enforcement agencies to gain immediate and, if necessary, covert access to unscramble any coded data. Extremists presumed that the citizens could not trust the elected government and the Supreme Court to make decisions or to correct mistakes if any are made, McDonald said. "Based on a theory of potential government abuse, important tools commonly used are to be restricted or embargoed," McDonald said. McDonald said efforts in the United States to enhance effective law enforcement search and seizure capabilities had proceeded without harming legitimate privacy concerns. In the area of electronic surveillance, McDonald said, privacy enhancements had frequently received treatment "superior to that required under our Constitution." With minor exceptions, neither the laws nor the cases decided regarding effective law enforcement or privacy had come about with the view that either were absolute in their nature, McDonald said. Law enforcement measures had been tempered by considerations of personal privacy, and privacy laws had been balanced with effective law enforcement. Notwithstanding the substantial threats posed by national and international organized crime, drug cartels, and terrorists, the United States had remained true to its Constitutional moorings, and its commitment to a system of ordered liberties, McDonald said. "When people don't know much about electronic surveillance, they are fearful of it. But when they know Congress passed laws and the Supreme Court reviewed them and that there are numerous constraints and procedures, then it makes sense to them. It seems rational and balanced," McDonald said. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- David HM Spector spector(a)zeitgeist.com Network Design & Infrastructure Security voice: +1 212.580.7193 Amateur Radio: W2DHM (ex-N2BCA) (ARRL life member) GridSquare: FN30AS -.-. --- -. -. . -.-. - .-- .. - .... .- -- .- - . ..- .-. .-. .- -.. .. --- "New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled, the humiliating question arises, 'Why then are you not taking part in them?'" --H. G. Wells

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Crypto-victory in Commerce; Oxley talks about nuking Congress
by Declan McCullagh 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

So I'm sitting here in the lobbyist warren of the Capitol Grille on Pennsylvania Avenue getting sloshed on expensive beer -- and sick on the clouds of cigar smoke from industry representatives flush from their victory in the House Commerce committee earlier this evening. And they do have cause to celebrate. A week ago, the outlook in Congress was dismal. The House Intelligence committee had approved (during a closed hearing) the first-ever domestic restrictions on what technologies Americans can use to protect their privacy. The House Commerce committee seemed certain to follow. Rep. Oxley, who was pushing the proposal, told me last week he had the votes sewn up. The tide changed today when the Commerce committee overwhelmingly defeated Oxley's amendment. In a 35-16 vote, members rejected restrictions on manufacturing unapproved encryption devices and instead approved a modified version of Rep. Goodlatte's original Security and Freedom through Encryption (SAFE) bill. The vote came after a last-minute press by a diverse coalition of industry groups, including some who had never weighed in on crypto before, including the automobile companies and the Baby Bells. (In fact, the Bells may have been the deciding factor in defeating the measure.) The version of SAFE the Commerce committee approved includes: criminal penalties (doubled from the original) for the use of encryption in a crime, a prohibition on mandatory domestic key escrow, delinking certificate authorities from key escrow requirements, a "NET" center to coordinate law enforcement codebreaking, a classfied study to be conducted by the Attorney General, a NIST study on crypto, and liability limitations on firms providing key recovery. It also includes SAFE's original export relaxation on encryption products that are already available overseas or are in the public domain. Many of those changes were proposed by Reps. Markey and White, who had their amendment approved 40-11. The amended bill was approved out of the committee by a 44-6 vote. (One lobbyist just leaned over, martini in hand, and asked me, "Do you need a quote, Declan?" //sigh//) Today's discussion before the committee was all about compromise -- which, after all, shouldn't be surprising. Washington politicians thrive on it. If politics is the art of the possible, compromise is its lifeblood. But to the chagrin of politicans, staffers, and bureaucrats alike, the politics of encryption doesn't provide one. Either you use backdoored crypto or you don't. Either you have unalloyed privacy or you don't. There's no middle ground. Of course it's one thing to compromise on tax bills or spending measures. That's not only expected, it's necessary. But it's another thing entirely to compromise on a bill that deals with fundamental freedoms. How many newspapers is it acceptable for the government to review and censor before publication? How many Americans can be imprisoned without a public trial? Sometimes, including now, Americans should stand on principle and reject that any and all "compromises." A coalition of groups from the American Civil Liberties Union to the Eagle Forum sent out just that letter earlier today. Those groups understand what high tech firms have been slow to realize: Congress will not, and cannot, approve a bill that benefits crypto-liberty. Right now there are no domestic controls on encryption. After Congress passes a bill, that will surely change. The crypto-in-a-crime provisions are destined to stay in. When crypto becomes omnipresent, Congress might just as well punish you for speaking Spanish in the commission of a crime. (By now the lobbyists are drunk. One just leaned over, laughing excitedly, and yelled in my ear: "Cold fusion still doesn't work!" Huh? Whatever. Seriously, folks, I do not make this stuff up. Another fellow says the quote of the day is: "The FBI tried to take the country hostage.") Anyway, today firms saw their arguments used against them. For years companies have testified before Congress that crypto was readily available at the corner software store. One Congressman recently even waved around a shrinkwrapped copy of Lotus Notes as a prop. At last the techno-impaired members of the House Commerce committee have realized that strong crypto was available through a point-and-click download (or for $19.95). But instead of allowing the //overseas// distribution of encryption, they instead came close to banning the //domestic// distribution. By now even the more censorhappy members of Congress are sick and tired of hearing about pedophiles and child pornographers and molesters and such. Even the druglords-wielding-crypto claims pales after a while -- at least if you've heard it 17 times in the past few weeks. So today Rep. Oxley whipped out his trump card: if you don't vote for my amendment, you'll get blown up! "How about some terrorist orgainztion acting with impunity because they have the ability to communicate with impunity gets a hold of a Russian nuclear device and threatens to blow up the Capitol of the United States?" In the end, Oxley's amendment didn't carry the day. It was of course almost entirely the successful lobbying -- and if firms can't win in the //Commerce// committee, where can they win? -- but to their credit, some Congressmen actually talked about the Constitutional issues involved. "This is about our liberty and how far we will go in protecting our liberties," said Rep. Rogan, a former prosecutor and judge who spoke against Oxley. The future, however, is uncertain. The bill now goes to the House Rules committee, whose chairman said today in a strongly-worded letter that he'd only allow a bill to go to the floor if it included Oxley's amendment. Look for a hell of a lot of behind-the-scenes lobbying on this now... -Declan ------------------------- Declan McCullagh Time Inc. The Netly News Network Washington Correspondent http://netlynews.com/

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news story in the SD Daily Transcript
by John Kelsey 17 Dec '03

17 Dec '03

Some of you might find an article in the San Diego Daily Transcript (I think it will appear tomorrow in the print version; it's up now at their website) interesting. It's an article about today's moderately good news from Congress, and I'm quoted extensively in it. (The reporter is an old friend of mine, and he knows what I do for a living, so he called me for a quote.) It's currently at http://www.sddt.com/files/library/97headlines/09_97/DN97_09_24/DN97_09_24_tb c.html and I *think* they will keep it up for a while. --John Kelsey, Counterpane Systems, kelsey(a)counterpane.com PGP 2.6 fingerprint = 4FE2 F421 100F BB0A 03D1 FE06 A435 7E36

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